(News) – “Heat Waves” simmered on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for 59 long weeks, but the mercury finally boiled over for the Glass Animals, who took No. 1 this week and set the record for the longest climb to the top. rating, according to Billboard. A song about “late nights in the middle of June” by the indie band from Oxford, England, first debuted in 2020 and appeared on the Hot 100 chart during the week of January 16, 2021. radio and through streaming services, as well as on TikTok.
Billboard puts it in a different context: “Heat Waves” is just the 23rd song out of some 30,000 archives to have spent 59 weeks on the chart altogether. Before the Glass Animals won the title of longest climb, Mariah Carey held that record: It took 35 weeks for her song All I Want for Christmas Is You to work its way to the top. “Heat Waves” did fall off the charts at one point for two weeks, but Billboard notes that of the eight songs in its record books that took the longest to reach No. 1, all but two experienced a temporary hiatus.
The BBC notes that it may have puzzled the band at first that despite being highly respected in the music industry as a whole, they weren’t big enough for radio stations and streaming services to automatically include the song in their playlist rotation. . The transition from alternative radio stations to pop music, as well as promotion through streaming, helped propel the song higher. Lead vocalist Dave Bailey, who formed the band in 2010 with childhood friends Joe Seaward, Ed Irwin-Singer and Drew MacFarlane, seems pleased with his new award. “I absolutely can’t believe it,” he says. “For that, it means absolute peace.” You can watch the music video in full here. (Read more stories about the Billboard charts.)